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FCC approves giant space mirror as astronomers warn of risks to the night sky
(www.thebrighterside.news)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
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Don't worry it's not going to happen. They're just after investor money then they'll vanish.
Even if they actually build this, a very small area of the planet is going to be imperceptibly brighter for 35 seconds.
People also said A.I. wouldn't happen. I don't trust them to not find some way to implement it in the worst possible way that impacts all of humanity. Like permanent daylight or something so there's never time to sleep but now there's 12 more hours in the day
They're still limited by the laws of physics and geometry. Assuming perfect reflection and perfect alignment with the sun to the target destination you're looking at something like 0.1 percent of the total brightness worth of energy being transmitted to the surface of the earth.
In other words, considerably dimmer than the moon. It's not going to turn night to day, it's not even going to turn at night to dusk, it will be the brightness of a crescent moon on an overcast night, assuming clear conditions. Covering an area of less than 3 km for a period of time of less than 20 minutes (increase the orbital altitude and you increase the amount of time that you can be over an area but you also decrease the brightness) I don't think Mr Badger is really going to notice.
But as I said this is irrelevant because they know this which is why they're not going to do it.
I agree with you that the current thing seems innocuous enough… but I think we've all been traumatised by recent events. Things have had a way of escalating extremely quickly, like: "oh yeah, we just approved 10,000 more satellites without even giving the general public a chance to react, so what?" Also, someone should coin that anime name.